Postdoctoral Researcher Stress in Action

Your function

You will be a key part of the project team that will run the Stress in Action cohort enrichment study that starts in 2026. The team will collect active and passive measures, including sensor data from smartphones, wearables, and ecological momentary assessment capturing the affective, cognitive, physiological, and behavioural components of the stress response in people’s natural environments. This work will generate unique large-scale datasets on daily life stress and its health impacts.

Your specific focus will be developing and implementing data processing pipelines for these large-scale multimodal datasets to enable scientific discovery. You will also contribute to team management and further develop standard operating procedures for data governance and data collection, covering topics such as study logistics, data privacy, and cross-cohort data linkage.

Advancing the careers of early-career researchers is one of the missions of the Stress in Action consortium, and this position offers you ample opportunity to engage in scientific endeavours that set you up for an academic career. From the outset, you will be able to run analyses and write papers leveraging the existing lab-based and ambulatory datasets from our Stress in Action wearable validation pipeline.

Subsequently, you will be able to use the Stress in Action cohort enrichment study data, strengthening your research profile and building a strong base for future grant applications regarding the consortium’s mission of better understanding stress-related disease.

In terms of teaching, you will support standard departmental activities, including co-teaching the undergraduate course Stress & Health, as well as B-thesis and M-thesis student supervision.

For this position you are expected to have:

• A PhD degree in the fields of psychology, health sciences, neuroscience, biomedical sciences, epidemiology, bioinformatics, computer sciences, or a related discipline (also candidates close to the thesis defence are encouraged to apply)
• Affinity and experience with writing research papers
• Experience and/or strong interest in working with large-scale, multimodal datasets
• Knowledge of basic psychometric principles and related statistical methodology
• Good programming skills in Python, R, Matlab, or other tools
• English conversation, writing skills, and presentation skills
• Communication and social skills
• Interest in supervision of students
• Dutch language skills are a strong asset

As a university, we strive for equal opportunities for all, recognising that diversity takes many forms. We believe that diversity in all its complexity is invaluable for the quality of our teaching, research and service. We are always looking for talent with diverse backgrounds and experiences. This also means that we are committed to creating an inclusive community so that we can use diversity as an asset.

A challenging position in a socially engaged organisation. At VU Amsterdam, you contribute to education, research and service for a better world. And that is valuable. So in return for your efforts, we offer you:

• a salary of minimum € 3.706,00 (Scale 10) and maximum € 5103,00 (Scale 10) gross per month, on a full-time basis. This is based on UFO profile Researcher 4. The exact salary depends on your education and experience.
• a position for at least 0.8 FTE. Your employment contract will initially last 1 year.
  
  Afterwards, the possibility of expansion exists.

We also offer you attractive fringe benefits and regulations. Some examples:

• A full-time 38-hour working week comes with a holiday leave entitlement of 232 hours per year. If you choose to work 40 hours, you have 96 extra holiday leave hours on an annual basis. For part-timers, this is calculated pro rata.
• 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus
• contribution to commuting expenses
• optional model for designing a personalized benefits package
• solid pension scheme (ABP)

Stress in Action project
In this project, more than 100 multidisciplinary scientists from eight Dutch academic institutes collaborate around the theme ‘stress in daily life’. Divided into three Research Themes and three…